SpringSource Buys Cloud Foundry, Java Goes Skyward

Though they themselves were just acquired by VMware, it appears that SpringSource (news, site) isn’t taking a second of down time. This week the company exercised its own wallet by picking up Cloud Foundry, a new-ish startup focused on pushing Java into the cloud.

The acquisition brings Cloud Foundry’s Java platform-as-a-service offering front and center as it enters its first public beta.

SpringSource Cloud Foundry

The team behind the tool describes it as enabling a process that takes a Java web application, preps it for the cloud, and then handles deployment and auto scaling. Developers are allowed to deploy and manage Spring, Grails and Java applications within a public cloud environment

SpringSource Cloud Foundry is built on creator Chris Richardson's previous open-source Cloud Tools project. The platform presents itself as a set of Amazon Machine Images that can automate application scaling across multiple cloud-hosted machines. But Richardson claims this is much more than just machine images: "A Java developer goes to a nice Web-based UI and uploads their WAR files, [then] they click a button that says 'deploy.' Then there's a monitoring and management component that's based on Hyperic and can automatically recover from failures,” he said (see the demo video here).

“SpringSource has a pretty clear mission, which we've been executing on for the last eight months or so,” said Johnson, CEO and Founder of SpringSource. “[The mission is] being the enterprise one-stop-shop for Java.”

Develop, Develop, Develop

SpringSource Cloud Foundry is still a beta baby. General availability is slated for early next year, according to Johnson. As far as enhancements go, future plans for the platform includes support for the Spring Tool Suite, Roo, Maven, etc. Additionally, the team claims the product will eventually be cloud-independent and will be offered for use with both commercial and internal clouds.